A Brief Tour of iOS 7 Changes

Apple 's iOS 7 is a dramatic departure from previous versions of the mobile operating system. According to Apple, the refresh, which will be available for download Wednesday, includes more than 200 new features.

Here is a tour of the biggest changes:

The Home Screen

Slide to Unlock

Apple

The home screen was completely reconstructed. Gone is the “slide to unlock” button that has been a fixture since the iPhone launched in 2007. In its place is simple, thinner text — that’s a hallmark of the new OS — and an arrow suggesting which direction to swipe.

This is more than just a new look. Users used to have to drag the “slide to unlock” button across its predefined path on the home screen. Google’s Android changed this paradigm, allowing customers to swipe in a direction. Now, iOS 7 does something similar.

Swiping from left-to-right on any empty part of the home screen triggers the device to unlock. Swiping a notification on the home screen, for example, starts the unlock process and then opens the app that sent the notification.

There are lines on the top and bottom of the screen. Pulling down opens the notification center, Apple’s alerts system introduced two years ago. That received a makeover, too, with a “Today” button that shows the weather, coming events and to-do items. Swiping up on the home screen activates the Control Center, another item borrowed from Android. From here, users can easily toggle Bluetooth, WiFi and other settings.

Icons and Design

The changes hammer home Apple’s departure from “skeuomorphism” — a design philosophy of recreating real-world objects in digital forms that customers will find familiar. An example is the previous iOS camera icon, which looked like a painstakingly redrawn camera lens. The new version in iOS 7 is much more generic and simple. (The website Neue vs. Old lets you compare and vote on the Apple icon overhauls.)

Skeuomorphism is a design that Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder who died in 2011, and Scott Forstall, one of his protégés, pushed to include in order to give a feeling of texture and familiarity.

Jonathan Ive, Apple’s industrial-design guru who took over software visual design last year, backs a minimalist approach. The iPhone in basic terms is an aluminum slab with glass, a mute switch and four buttons: power, volume up, volume down, home. That’s the kind of thinking he brought to iOS 7.

Multitasking, Safari and Other Changes

In iOS 7, buttons have been replaced with text that a customer merely taps. It all acts the same, so a user already familiar with an Apple device shouldn’t have trouble transitioning to the new look. Text that was once surrounded by a button is still in the same place as it was before, as are most of the ways each app functions.

Other things that have been refined. Siri, for example, has been updated to include information from new sources, such as Wikipedia and Twitter. Safari received a new tabbed design that creates something of a digital rolodex of websites visited.

Multitasking was given a much more visual design, with each app represented as a “card” that can be flicked toward the top of the screen to close the program. (Programs close automatically anyway, so there’s no need to force them to close.) Developers can now code apps to open periodically to pull new messages, articles or updates.